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Comment by CodeCompost | Hacker News Reader

The only place I hear about Elixir is here on HN.

It's talked about a bit on Twitter with the hashtag #MyElixirStatus. Discord makes use of it as well. Same with Supabase.

The problem is the languages one would hear about, fall into the OOP category, functional languages tend to not be as fashionable when you do get into one, you become almost a zealot.

It's hard to fight the imprinting a language has with its first fans, Elixir because of its Erlang origins tends to have the identity of telephonic-based use cases. Similar to how Rust gets its reputation as a specialist language (cli,kernal, etc) even though you could use it for web apps as well.

The last reason is, it's really hard to fight the gravity pool of NextJS and React.

Personally my circle and company and country are solidly on the side of C#/Java/PHP/Python and React/Angular, the average developer who fits into that grouping might not have even heard of Svelt or SolidJs when they do hear about it, they immediately make some snide comment about JS fatigue, even though that hasn't been a thing for a while.

> it's really hard to fight the gravity pool of NextJS and React.

Indeed. I love Elixir and I even struggle with choice when I don't need much or any server-side functionality.

There was a Jekyll-style project for Elixir some years ago but it fell into bitrot and deprecation. I'm still hoping somebody resurrects it or builds an equivalent, because using eex to build a static site is a really great experience.

Have you seen Griffing, your post prompted me to scan for an active project (many graveyards)

https://github.com/elixir-griffin/griffin

Back in 2018 I took a graduate level distributed systems course from a professor who spent most of his lecture time rambling on about how we’d be better off reading HN than our textbook. There were no exams, only four projects which involved implementing various classic distributed algorithms (gossip, chord, etc.) in Elixir.

For what it’s worth, Elixir is now my preferred language for personal projects, although I still haven’t had a chance to use it professionally.

Interesting, are the syllabus + assignments published online somewhere?

Wish it was different but realistically I feel like you are right (outside of Elixir specific communities).

I love working with Elixir and have done so successfully for the past 4 years at various companies, however I have been trying to find a new client for a while now and I'm getting close to the point of looking for other types of work because things are looking bleak. From what I can tell there are also way more people looking for Elixir work than available jobs, unfortunately.

In my 15+ years of software development in various languages Elixir has been the most enjoyable developer experience for me. So I guess I'll just have to think of a side project where I can apply it and do less fun stuff to earn bread.

Yeah it's tough right now. One of the saddest things for me is the vicious cycle of "we can't use elixir because nobody uses elixir, so we can't use elixir because nobody uses elixir" ad infinitum. It's such a wonderful and productive stack, but people are just insanely comfortable with their typescript (or laravel, or rails, etc).

For what it's worth there are at any one time 50-75 people writing Elixir at my company, and we have projects ranging in age from 6 years to some things started this year.

The main reason is probably because Elixir USP is the stability of the apps written in it and how easy it is to build distributable software with it imo. You have to be an experienced engineer in order to appreciate those two things and have specific problems which most don't have.

However I think with Phoenix Liveview Elixir gives regular developers a productivity boost that could be it's own USP.

I have only written a small elixir app but I was mind blown over Liveview and still is convinced that most people would be better of using it over a SPA.

Sounds like to work in a boring monoculture, then. Thank pg you have Hacker News to keep you up to date with the rest of the programming world.

I built approximated.app on elixir, proxying 300k+ domains. It's a great ecosystem, I've never seen anything else handle really hard problems so well in my 15 years as a developer.

Concurrency? Trivial.

Reliability? Unbelievable. (YouTube Sasa Juric's "Soul of Elixir" talk)

Clustering/horizontal scaling? Built in, even across networks.

Web framework? Competitive with the best (I'd argue better, with liveview but YMMV).

AI/ML? Amazing support and tooling.

Embedded/IoT? Incredible support with the nerves project.

There's only 2 places where I feel it falls down a bit:

1) brittle dev tooling in ElixirLS that trips up new and experienced devs alike. Soon to get better though as competing LSPs are in the works.

2) no official release-as-binary tooling yet. Things are way better in the last few years for releases, and you're probably containerizing anyways, but I am jealous of e.g. Go's single file binaries.

It doesn't have a major corporate sponsor, which is probably why. It's a very active community, though.

It's a very good point. I consider it is a language of "connoisseurs" at the moment. I've been exchanging with computer science schools here in France to see how to increase adoption.

Students, presented with the capabilities of the language (scripting / machine learning / scalable web apps) are quite interested actually!

there’s a pretty well established community on mastodon as well as xitter. not sure where you hang out online obvs but it’s not exactly niche anymore, maybe branch out a bit?

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